Rétrospective Jean Grémillon au BFI

From
02/07/2013
to
30/07/2013

Highly regarded in France, Jean Grémillon is less well known internationally than he deserves to be. The BFI retrospective shows that Grémillon’s layered and meticulous films place him among the greatest directors of classical French cinema. His films will be projected all through the month of July.

Perhaps inevitably, given the span of Grémillon’s career (the late silent era to the late 50s) and the fact that his most famous films saw him work with Jean Gabin and Jacques Prévert, it is Jean Renoir and Marcel Carné who spring to mind as points of comparison. Even more than Carné, Grémillon pioneered the kind of cinema later known as ‘poetic realism’. To some degree, his films are more to do with ‘realism’ than the ‘poetic’; both at the start of his career and at its premature end (he died just 58 in 1959), he made documentaries, while most of his features in the interim years display a documentary-like interest both in the topography of a particular region and in aspects of life specific to that area.

For further information and to purchase tickets, please visit the BFI's website.